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American Irony: This Facebook Page Will Destroy Your Faith In Humanityhttp://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/12/american-irony-this-facebook-page-will-destroy-your-faith-in-humanity/
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/12/american-irony-this-facebook-page-will-destroy-your-faith-in-humanity/#commentsThu, 20 Dec 2012 15:36:06 +0000http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=471213It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: in the wake of a national event that has a lot of people looking for a legislative solution, start a Facebook page which ostensibly calls for the banning of another controversial piece of machinery. As Generalfeldmarschall von Moltke once wrote, however, no plan survives […]

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: in the wake of a national event that has a lot of people looking for a legislative solution, start a Facebook page which ostensibly calls for the banning of another controversial piece of machinery. As Generalfeldmarschall von Moltke once wrote, however, no plan survives the first contact with the enemy.

The Facebook page is question is called Ban The Ford Mustang and it contains a combination of deliberately provocative graphics like the one above and pictures of accident scenes where a Mustang was involved. The implication is that Mustangs are responsible for none of the fatalities; rather, it’s the drivers’ own incompetence or recklessness that caused the deaths. Since nobody is calling for Mustangs to be banned due to their high-speed capacity, presumably firearms in private hands should be extended the same courtesy.

There are a couple of problems with this analogy. The first one is that there are certainly a reasonable number of people who would be alive today had they chosen to purchase a Toyota Yaris instead of a Mustang. Fast cars get to dangerous speeds faster and many people are more prone to speeding and reckless behavior if they are behind the wheel of a fast car.

The second problem is that there are people calling for fast cars to be banned, whether for purposes of public safety or to prevent excessive resource consumption. It’s not a common viewpoint in the United States; anti-sports-car people here tend to use the soft attack of ridicule. But in the EU, it’s already been suggested once, and a quick trawl through the English-language Singapore and Hong Kong blogs shows it’s not exactly a forbidden concept over there.

Of course, the merits of the analogy have been lost on a significant percentage of the site’s commenters, who appear to take the call for the Mustang’s removal from public roads entirely seriously.

Yes, that man’s wearing a “5.0” sweatshirt. At least he spelled “pussy” correctly, placing him easily in the top quartile of intellectual capacity among the people responding to the page. A common complaint among these people is that the page is a plot by a disaffected Camaro owner hoping to ensure marketplace supremacy for the porky Chevrolet by actually having the Mustang removed from showrooms. Others want a similar page made for the Challenger, just in the interest of fairness, and also because the HEMI sucks balls.

In the end, “Ban The Ford Mustang” could be said to make precisely the point it had hoped to counter: people not only can’t be trusted to own guns, or Mustangs, they can’t be trusted to own anything, a computer least of all. This modern-day Jonathan Swift has found out that some people would eat children.